Sunday, April 18, 2010

Day 116 or 117; meter box fixed into position

We didn't go to our house yesterday, but we noticed today that someone had come to fix the meter box, which was hanging loose in the sitting room.

So now the meter box is secured - the meter box positioned was out by just a few inches when the slab was poured, but the fix is pretty easy. You can see the big orange conduit coming from the bottom of the meter box, going into a pipe which runs into and under the slab out to the underground power pit on the footpath. The yellow pipe is a gas line up to the heater in the roof space, and all the white wires are for 240V power to the house. And if you look hard through the very dirty horizontal feature window, you can see our neighbour's lovely (and by lovely I mean awful) brick wall, as they've got not one, but two garage walls on our western boundary. Going to have to cover up that horrible view, probably with bamboo screeners and something green and leafy. Haven't thought about landscaping yet - got months to get into that!

We did our usual Sunday afternoon drive to check out other builds in the area; this photo below is of an extended Laguna that had their slab laid a week before ours, but seems to be going a little slower than us now.

The bricks they're using is also Austral Melbourne series, but Cotham with flush off-white mortar. I think it's a light brown crossed with orange, but it's hard to describe - I think it looks pretty good in real life, but Tina isn't a fan of it.

One thing about the Hawthorn series of bricks is that there's quite a bit of colour variation, in particular tiny black specks that you can't see unless you're a few inches from the brick, and more obvious large dark spots on bricks that you can see in the photo above. Not everyone likes variation in bricks, and there's plenty of bricks created for almost 100% uniformity, but we like the variation and contrast. The owner of this house chose black (monument) for their windows, which reflects the black variations in the bricks. Now the other interesting thing about black is that Metricon don't recommend dark exterior colours - probably because our climate can be pretty scorching, and the darker colours would absorb more heat and then have more potential problems due to warping etc. Anyway, we also chose some dark exterior colours (as have thousands of others building new houses), and hope it won't be an issue!